Why groups?

Guy Gladstone

What is possible in a group that is not possible in individual sessions? The content or raw material brought to both may hardly differ. What differs is what happens with more or less all forms of experience when brought into a room with perhaps ten to sixteen other people all bringing theirs. All at once there is a massive potential for relatedness, for an intensive appreciation of one’s own and other’s worlds. For most people such a bonanza gathering up of experience is a project with promise. Given that groups occupy a position somewhere in between the privacy and containment of the individual session and the relative anonymity and boundarilessness of public places, then the group is a unique combination of safety and excitement.

As facilitator of the group, I too am infused with this unpredictability and compared with individual sessions much more of me will inevitably be visible by virtue of the varieties of relating I am challenged to engage in. One single moment of group process will often be experienced in astonishingly different ways and as these experiencings are revealed so still further interpretations become possible by group members and myself. Some people however do not thrive in this area of autonomy and diversity. Like double cream it is too rich, they could choke on it. But if every expression evokes an impression elsewhere in the group then the chemistry of the encounter between any two group members, with the varying levels of participation of the others present, can over time move the interaction of the whole group to the level of ‘‘alchemy’ (the art of transmuting base metals into gold, metaphorically speaking).

The Open Centre continues to host an extraordinary range of group work, preserving a setting that is needed now more than ever. Estrangement of people from themselves and each other proceeds apace under the unreal canopy of nineties public relations. Twenty five years ago Jerome Liss, one of the early exponents in Britain of Humanistic Psychology within groupwork, published Free to Feel (Wildwood House 1974). Groupwork at the Open Centre, founded in 1977, has its roots in the shift of consciousness described therein, whereby groupwork became more than a normalising process with an essentially adaptive agenda and came to be about people’s potentials, whole people, bodyminds – there are no patients in treatment at The Open Centre.

Individual sessions can probably never quite do justice to the social nature of human beings. Whereas the dyad of practitioner and single client tends to represent the earliest mother-child relationship, the triad of the (minimal) group of three tends to introduce themes connected with father, family and society beyond. At this more oedipal level more conflicts can be sustained and worked through, the group functioning as a series of triads, checking the mergers of dyads, fostering differentiation, an inherent feature of maturity. This series of triads also ensures the representation of more than one helping viewpoint, thus curbing excessive dependency on authority (the group leader), modelling the potentials of ”power with” rather than ”power over”. Furthermore, many of the ”natural” or traditional groupings that are intermediate between the isolated individual and mass society e.g. families, church, political parties, may not address the resolution of interpersonal emotional difficulties amongst their members.

Groupwork can be categorised according to whether the group offers individual work with the group leader in a group setting, or members working with each other with the leader facilitating this endeavour, or a focus on the group as a whole by the group leader. These are not necessarily exclusive categories and the percentage of each dimension present in any given group fluctuates. Like Janus, groupwork faces both inwards and outwards, situated more midway between the psyche and the social than private psychotherapy can ever be. Whereas in individual work my role is akin to that of the prostitute i.e. taking the place of another in a partial intimacy, in groupwork it is a more dual role; on the one hand like a janitor I manage a boundary; on the other hand like a catalyst I have the task of animating.

On the continent a group leader is commonly referred to as an ”animateur”. For myself, as a practitioner of bioenergetics and psychodrama, this is the term which best gives the flavour of my own style of groupwork. Someone who brings to life, who if not formally spiritual, is at least both spirited and spiriting, aiming to combine in practitionership elements of an art form and a political act. Groupwork can then extend beyond its healing and wholing assignments to become a theatre of activism for social change, a rehearsal space that is fun and exciting as well as painful and testing, all the while preparing the players for serious changes out there.

© Guy Gladstone 1999